Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. It started back in 2004 with a book. We're still watching it happen.

11.21.2013

Fall lower, reach higher

I'm sure we're all watching "Ordinary Love" by now whether we subscribe to U2. com or not. It seems to me cut from the same bolt of cloth as a prior movie song, "Hands that Built America," or --funny, I can't think of the name of the other one right now "Electrical Storm." Anyway, I'm intrigued by the elevator inscribed with what seem to be sections of Dante's Inferno (I've identified Canto 11 which describes the tomb of Pope Anastasius.) What else? The wind imagery is no surprise. Interested by "your heart" on the
sleeve that can't be washed away, while the lyrics of the song
themselves seem easy to wash away if we are to take the end of the video
at face value. The theme of the vital need to "feel" and "deal with" not romantic or special but "ordinary" love, and the idea that it's this kind of love that really requires toughness to hang in with, chimes with some of No Line's ideas; it also makes a provocative counterpart to a film about Mandela, a great hero (someone who we would often want to set apart as extraordinary, capable of the unusual, not like ordinary old us -- but perhaps these are ideas I'm smuggling in with me.)

6 comments:

Reminds me a lot of "Window in the Skies" with the rising/falling, ascending/descending language. "Oh, cant you see what love has done? What it's doing to me?" For good or for bad, love is tough, transformational, and in the end cosmic/supernatural.

Meghan et al: it now seems that themagic marker line and "all this time I thought the world couldn't wash it away?" was about Mandela's failed marriage:---

U2.com: Can you explain the idea behind the words disappearing?

Oliver: It’s about the difficulty of permanent love. The correspondence between Nelson Mandela and Winnie (his then wife) worked so well within confinement but when he was released, the real world took its toll and made it go away. So it was about the lack of anything permanent, really. It’s disheartening, but it's also heartening to a degree, where it inspires you to hurry up a little bit.Mac: The idea of the writing fading is that when things go away, it’s often not a clean break. They fade away in different forms and different manners, different ways. It’s not a clean process. You don't know how its exactly happening but you can see that it is. I think Oliver and I both responded to the song in that it didn't look to sugarcoat a real moment for a very epic man. The opportunity to portray that human element of someone so grand is pretty humbling. We wanted to do the best work to represent that.http://www.u2.com/news/title/in-camera

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"U2 Sermons" began as a blog tracking the experience of publishing the book "Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog." It's continued as a place to observe the dialogue between U2's work and theology.